


Fresh, Wet, Red, Painful

by cand86



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: BDSM, Bloodplay, F/M, Heavy BDSM, Knifeplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:05:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cand86/pseuds/cand86
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are not having a moment. It’s only that the sight of her putting scalpel to skin stirs something inside of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fresh, Wet, Red, Painful

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me I'm not the only person who watched Sherlock murmur "Mmm, that's lovely." and had their mind go there . . .

" _No_. I am dissecting a body in the middle of the night. We are not having a moment."

She's ruined it, this moment she insists they're not having, but she's not wrong to do so. He know this isn't the place for it. Sherlock's never had an erection in a morgue, and he's not about to start now. Best not to muddle work with what it is that they do.

It's only that the sight of her putting scalpel to skin stirs something inside of him. Corpses don't bleed, but his mind's eye paints the dry incision with intimate memory: the welling up, the oozing, a trickle winding its jagged path across the body. The autopsies he's attended number in the dozens, but none have made his pulse race like this, so it naturally follows: the only thing that's different about this situation, empirically, is her.

For all the ways he's asked and she's devised to inflict pain, she's never cut him. And she had touched his scar only once, her fingers lingering just a second too long for mere curiosity, the touch diagnostic and purposeful before they hastily retreated. Whatever she'd deduced in that moment- _too deliberate to be an old injury, not placed right for any surgical procedure_ \- she'd kept to herself. They never spoke of it.

He had thought he never wanted to open that scar again. But not now, watching the graceful movement of her hands, the concentration in her eyes, the deadly tool handled with such deliberate and deft precision. Now, he's feeling . . . tempted.

And these are dangerous thoughts.

It had made him violently ill to think about it in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, that this unique pleasure they'd shared had become her demise. They made for feverish dreams: the memory of her knife carving a line of weeping red in his skin spliced with how he couldn't help but imagine M slashing hers. His bright blood _drip-dripping_ onto the hardwood, just how hers surely must have flowed, before it settled into that thick, black awful pool, staining the very same floor. The drugs had helped to quiet those nightmares, some.

If Joan pressed against the barrier of his skin and broke through, would it all come crashing down around him? Or would he feel only the dizzying release, the one that he'd forgotten, pushed into the back of his mind? He had let many have their way with his exterior- well, let, begged, and paid- slaps that sent blood pooling in a rosy flush under his stricken skin, floggings that left violet bruises from the broken capillaries beneath. But he hadn't allowed another person beyond that last dermal boundary- not since Irene. Even the tattoos on his back in need of touching up go without.

And Joan- what about Joan? The last time she had cut living flesh had been enough to drive her from the act entirely. Perhaps they'd both be flung into their respective pasts at the first nick. Old traumas rendered fresh and wet and red and painful.

"There's no broken ribs." Her professional analysis tugs him out of the downward-spiral of his train of thought and it's easier, suddenly, to push it aside, now that she's opened the long, elegant incision into the yawning medical gape of an open chest cavity.

She leans forward- she's spotted something out of place, which will mean an answer, which will mean a step closer to Moriarty. But even as he moves in to peer closer, the scalpel on the tray remains there, first in his peripheral vision, then only in the back of his mind.

Waiting.


End file.
